THIS COLUMN COMES FROM THE SOUTH RIM of the Grand Canyon in hot and sunny northern Arizona. I am here photographing a long list of wildflowers, trees and some small mammals.

(Yes, there are trees in Arizona.) I am currently working on several new field guides for the state of Arizona and this is part of my research.

Today I have taken a break from shooting what I need to photograph and decided to photograph something I want to — the California Condor. This is what has brought me to the edge of the Grand Canyon where the vastness and beauty of this natural marvel is overwhelming.

I was here five or six years ago shortly after the initial reintroduction of the condor to northern Arizona, so I was interested in seeing how the largest bird in North America was doing.

The condor reintroduction goal was to release enough of these prehistoric birds in northern Arizona and southern Utah to establish a breeding population. That way if a disease or natural disaster occurred within the main population of condors in California, there would be a healthy gene pool from which to repopulate the species.

First a little history of the condor. During the height of the last ice age — about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago — the condors flew over the land in search of dead carcasses of huge pre-historic animals such as the Ground Sloth and Woolly Mammoth.

Bones of the condor have been recovered in several caves in the Grand Canyon that date to the Ice Age. For unknown reasons sometime after the Ice Age the condors disappeared from the Grand Canyon; by the time European settlement occurred the condors were found only along the Pacific Coast from Canada to Baja California.

By the 1800s, the remaining condor population began to decline for a variety of reasons. Not surprising, most were human-related. By the early 1920s fewer than a hundred condors were in existence. By the 1980s, there were only 22 California Condors in the world.